Legal

“Federal legislation has become too long, too cumbersome, and unreadable
thus causing too many laws to be passed without
understanding the implications.”

“Our constitution
works. Our great republic is a government of laws, not of men.” Gerald R. Ford.

Philosophy
(Background, Issues, Objectives):

Since
its founding in 1974, the Congressional
Budget Office (CBO)
has produced independent, nonpartisan, timely analysis of economic and
budgetary issues to support the Congressional budget process.

CBO analyses do not make policy
recommendations, and each report and cost estimate discloses its
assumptions and methodologies.

All CBO employees are appointed
solely on the basis of professional competence, without regard to
political affiliation.

The Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs
(OIRA) is located within the Office of
Management and Budget and was created by Congress with the enactment of the
Paperwork Reduction Act of 1980 (PRA).

With more than 4,000 criminal offenses, this country in the throes
of “over-criminalization”
with everyone guilty of some offense every day.

Laws must be
interpreted by courts.

Obfuscation
opens up for unintended (or subliminal) consequences.

Riders and
amendments are frequently tacked on to legislation to short circuit the
review process.

Federal law is a confused mess with the U.S. Code disorganized and
unreadable.

In 1926,
Congress adopted the U.S. Code as a framework for federal law.

Since 1947, Congress has been slowly, very
slowly enacting parts of the Code, on a title-by-title basis, into law.

Out of
the 51 subject-matter titles, 26 have been enacted as positive law which represents
only one third of the volume of the Code.

The
bulk of the Code is still not law and cannot be amended directly, forcing
the bill-drafters to embark into a maze of hundreds of years of past
individual statutes as they write the next
unintelligible congressional bill.

Private property is protected in the
Constitution.

5th
Amendment protects private property from being taken for public use without
just compensation.

Eminent domain
is the acquisition of real private property for the completion of a public
project.

Conservative State ballot propositions
have increased on issues not adequately addressed at the Federal level.

44 states have
laws that preserve the traditional definition of marriage, with 8 more
proposed.

18 states have
passed constitutional amendments protecting marriage, with propositions
for 8 more.

16 states have
proposed laws to limit eminent domain and/or protect land use.

Several states
imposed term limits upon both their constitutional officers and
legislature representatives, with 2 more states proposing term limits.

There are 40 tax
measures, with proposition for Taxpayer Payer Bill of Rights in four
states.

A ban on racial
preferences has been added to the Michigan ballot.

Special Prosecutors have been appointed
to examine government misdeeds.

A special prosecutor is a lawyer
from outside the government to investigate a government official for
misconduct while in office.

Special
prosecutors have been accused of partisan prosecution, driven by political
agenda.

Special
prosecutor investigations have been very expensive with minimal results.

Businesses
incur non-legal expenses to comply with the tort system, from document
management systems, to executive time lost in depositions and pretrial
preparation, to activities foregone because of legal risk.

Businesses and
individuals change their behavior in inefficient ways because of the
misaligned incentives of the tort system.

oFeatures unique to the United States raise costs
astronomically, such as unbounded noneconomic damages; a broader use of
punitive damages; contingent fees of a percentage of recovery; the lack of
loser-pays system; extraordinarily broad discovery; class-action litigation;
and the use of speculative and nonscientific expert testimony in some state
courts.

§“American
rule” requires each side in a dispute must pay its own lawyers,
regardless of the outcome.

Medical
malpractice cost has driven doctors cost up and even from their
profession.

oIn 2003 and 2005, Texas adopted
medical malpractice lawsuit abuse reforms that within three years medical
malpractice insurance premiums were reduced by 35%.

Excessive
punitive damages have driven companies out of business.

Businesses
routinely avoid litigious opportunities.

Inconsistent
legal application further confuses the law.

Class
action suits were designed to make legal system more accessible and less
expensive.

The class action lawsuit created a legal
mechanism that allowed many plaintiffs with similar claims to file one
collective lawsuit.

Instead of creating efficiencies in the
lawsuit process, class actions have increasingly been used as a weapon to
extract mega settlements from businesses that often must decide between
the risky “bet the company” path of a trial with a possible
crippling jury award or agreeing to settle for a certain amount.

Class actions are one of the primary
reasons tort costs amount to 1.9% of GDP in the U.S. as compared to
0.5-0.7% in other OECD countries.

Lawyers, however, make out very well, receiving
much of the money consumers pour into the class action system.

Often, plaintiffs’ lawyers arrange
settlements that provide for millions of dollars in lawyers’ fees
and leave the plaintiffs themselves with relatively small awards, or in some
cases, coupons for products or future services from the very company by
which they were supposedly wronged.

ACLU is working to ensure the US government
complies with universal rights principles.

Constitution is
“supreme Law of the Land” and defines US civil rights.